Sherri Widen, Ph.D.sherri.widen@yale.eduPersonal webpageSherri is currently an Associate Research Scientist at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. Her research investigates how children’s emotion concepts change in the preschool and early grade school years. Her broader interest is the nature of concepts, where they come from, and how they change with development. In studying emotion concepts and categories such as love, anger, and disgust, and how children’s understanding of such emotions change, Sherri aims to study real world, natural concepts rather than artificial ones. Traditionally, it has been assumed that children’s knowledge of emotion was based on some early exposure to facial expressions and understanding of them in terms of discrete emotions. Many of Sherri's findings have been contrary to this view showing that children’s early understanding of emotion, including facial expressions, is broad and valence-based (feels good vs. feels bad) and that facial expression are not strong cues to emotion for children.

Mary H. Kayyal, Ph.D.kayyalm@gmail.comPersonal webpageMary is currently a full-time Lecturer at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Her research interests stem from the notion that to make sense of our emotional world, we divide emotions into categories, such as happiness, fear, sadness, anger, and so on. But where do these emotion categories come from? The prevailing view is that our emotion categories are innate, universal, and fixed reflections of reality. On this prevailing view, we see our emotional world the way it is, regardless of how old we are, where we come from, or what language we speak; Mary's research does not support this view. For the past 8 years, She has studied how West Bank Palestinians compare to Americans in the meaning they find in emotional facial expressions, words, situations, and behaviors. The similarities between Palestinians and Americans tell a compelling story about the universal maturation of emotion understanding. Their differences show that culture and language color that understanding. Mary proposes that the categories into which humans divide emotions are end-products of a long developmental path shaped by nature and nurture.

Nicole Nelson, Ph.D.n.nelson@uq.edu.auNicole is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Queensland. Her research interests include children's understanding of nonverbal expressions; the differential effects of body posture on perceptions of emotional facial expressions; and dynamic presentations of facial, bodily and vocal cues of emotion.

Nicole Trauffer, MA ntrauff@gmail.com﻿﻿Nicole is currently a Doctoral candidate at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Her research interests fall into the categories of developmental and clinical forensic psychology. More specifically, she is interested in how emotion development is related to juvenile offending. Her Masters' thesis focused on how children with disruptive behaviors perceive facial expressions of emotion, particularly expressions of disgust and anger.

Marissa DiGirolamo, MA marissa.digirolamo@bc.edu I received my Bachelor of Science in Psychology from Boston College in May 2013. My research focuses on how children and adults perceive nonsense facial expressions that do not convey any specific emotion. I have shown that recognition of these facial expressions relies on a process of elimination procedure, therefore the emotion that is seen in a face depends on details of method. Marissa is currently pursuing a Ph.D. program at Brandeis University in the area of social neuroscience.

Katrina AmaralKatrina's independent study examined how people conceptualize pride and whether they have a better understanding of this self-conscious emotion from related facial expressions or stories. Katrina also helped to recruit participants and conduct experimental tasks for a study investigating the impact gaze direction has on children's understanding of disgust .

Elena GomezElena's independent study examined the correlation between facial expressions and the violation of the purity foundation within the morality domains. Elena also also helped to recruit participants and conduct experimental tasks for a study investigating disgust sensitivity in children.

Kimberly YuKimberly helped to recruit participants and conduct experimental tasks for a study investigating children's use of the process of elimination in attributing certain facial expressions to specific emotion labels.

Erin BurkeErin's senior thesis with Dr. Russell investigated at what age children begin to understand personality concepts of others. Erin is currently in the Master's program for Mental Health Counseling at Fordham University Graduate School of Education.Poster - 2015 BC Psychology Undergraduate Research Conference

Carolyn EspositoCarolyn worked on a study investigating children's use of the process of elimination in attributing certain facial expressions to specific emotion labels by recruiting participants.

Alexandra AllamAfter working on several studies that investigated how certain emotions impact food preferences, Alexandra completed an honors thesis that expanded upon these results. Simultaneously, Alexandra worked on studies that explored when and to what extent children learn to recognize and label different emotions in various facial expressions. Alexandra is currently pursuing a PhD in Clinical Psychology at St. John's University, where she is studying the development of mental health issues in order to improve both evidence-based treatments and preventative interventions.

Alyssa Granger​Alyssa worked on a study investigating how the emotion, disgust, is interpreted by adults. Currently, Alyssa is currently pursuing a career in nursing at the University of Maryland.